


Some Things Must Be Nurtured

by More_night



Series: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e09 And the Woman Clothed with the Sun…, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 05:50:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5036245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After his meeting with Jack, Will goes to the BSHCI to see Hannibal for the first time in years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Things Must Be Nurtured

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place partly at the end of The Great Red Dragon (3x08) and during the beginning of And the Woman Clothed with the Sun (3x09).
> 
> Italics are excerpts from mental spaces, flashbacks and so on.

Trying to keep things motionless inside him, Will sat in his car, for a time, and, for a time, it seemed to work. He shut his eyes and focused on what he heard: footsteps moving away from the parking lot, car doors closing loudly and a single crow, crying out. He saw it, _dark feathers, flesh in its mouth, antlers instead of claws. It cawed again and attempted to look at Will, but it had no eyes and maggots pulsed in a heap on its chest._

He looked at himself in the rear-view mirror and he seemed normal, but he had spent the last years thinking that whenever he could appear normal, that meant others would see him that way and that meant he was safe and trustworthy, preserved. Initially, he had considered it moving on: looking down at his body, recovering, feeling dead inside, but seeing himself every morning in the mirror, and saying, _see?_ , I’m fine, I’m alive. He was not sure anymore how to call it. It was not survival.

The case file was beside him, pale against the dark hue of the passenger seat, and there was Jack’s voice again. _“You could do this without him, Will.”_

_Will stared straight ahead and the walls of Jack’s office closed in on him. “This one is… singular, he’s sealed, like a lock box. I have the key, I don’t know where the lock is,” he said._

_“I didn’t bring you out here to do this.”_

_Chuckling, Will turned to the window, searched for the sun, light did not make it to him. “I don’t know if you should tell that to yourself, or to me, Jack.”_

_Jack sat back in his seat. “You think I don’t care?”_

_“I think…” Will pursed his lips. “I don’t think you don’t care.”_

_The sunlight in the blinds dimmed as a cloud passed. Jack got up, circled his desk. “That part of you. It’s been cut out, Will.”_

_“No. It’s locked away. It’s with him in his cell.”_

_“And I’m about to send you to search for the lock.” Jack frowned and several tones of concern went over his face. “What are you hoping for?”_

_“Solving the case. Saving lives. Going home,” Will tried. “What do you think I’m hoping for?”_

_Jack tilted his head slightly and the concern turned to conjecture. “I think you’re feeling for a phantom limb,” he said. “It’s not there, Will. You’re gonna reach for it and find void.”_

_Will headed for the door, wondering if there would be anything beyond it at all._

Getting out of the car, he made his way across the partially filled parking lot. The large doors seemed as threatening as they had always been, not a promise of potential judgement, and now a part of his life. He needed to rely on these doors now, to make sure they kept something in.

The guard at the entrance booth glanced at his authorization. Alana had signed it. It was scanned and Will looked away. The tall black man gave him directions then and Will had to listen because this cell was not with the others. He went up the stairs and turned left, away from the cell-blocks and toward the administrative offices and the visiting rooms.

He reached the tiny elevator. The glossy doors opened before he pressed the button, revealing Frederick Chilton, coat folded on his arm, leather attaché case in hand.

“Will Graham,” he stated, stepping forward, eyes bright in surprise.

Will wedged his hands down his coat pockets and kept his head high. “Frederick.”

“What can possibly owe us the pleasure?”

“Casework. Why are you using the we, Frederick?” Will said. “You don’t work here anymore.”

Chilton stared straight at him and pondered openly for a short moment. “At least, some things don’t change,” he finally muttered. “Have you read my book? I thought about sending you a copy, but figured it could be cheeky.”

Pulling back, Will staggered inside and the grounds of his mind split open. He was not sinking in yet and his bet was that he could keep his head above the sludge. “No, I didn’t. Your testimony was something in and of itself.”

Chilton reached for his bag. Will looked away at the tiny window at the end of the corridor and kept his eyes there, wishing he could jump, or fly, or _be on the other side of the glass and look inside at himself, but then what would he see?_ Frederick said, “Here. Take this one.” He was holding out a newly printed copy of his book, heavy and copious.

“No, thank you. Really,” Will maintained.

Still holding the book, Frederick gestured with it. “Is it me? Or the subject?” He placed it down on a nearby chair. “Is it you Dr. Bloom is meeting?” he asked, both curious and derisive.

“Not right away, no.”

Chilton smiled widely. “Oh, it is the subject.” He started to slip on his coat, tying a precious aqua and burgundy paisley scarf around his neck. “If you haven’t seen him in a while, he’s changed a bit,” he began.

Will cut him short. “Prison does that. It would have changed you.”

Disregarding the veiled words, Chilton went on gladly. “I was just with him. He’s in a very good mood today. Is he expecting you?”

As Will swallowed, the sinking carried on downward and, when he stopped grasping himself clearly down there, it was dark and disheartened. “He was… probably told I was coming, yes.”

Standing wrapped in scholarly glee, Chilton intended to give him the full tour. Will was Dante now and Virgil walked him around, mocking and sniggering in the shelter of divinity, holding the leash. “All the fussiness is pretty much gone. Still got some class, though.” His voice toned down. It got gossipy. “They cut his hair short. He hates it. Dr. Bloom lets him have books and sketching pads. They meet on occasions, share a glass a wine. Sometimes, he can cook. She put him in a nice place too,” he listed. “I mean, nicer than the basement.”

“Well, he’s special,” Will said.

_The chair’s fake leather was cold initially and had warmed to his skin after a time. His head was leaning back now. He sensed the needle in his arm like a piece of wood, bigger than his wrist, pulling the skin taut, and he was stiffening. He had agreed to all this, he should concentrate._

_“Focus,” Chilton said. A hand under his neck, taking his head back up. “Now, describe what you can remember.”_

_“It’s…” Will started and it felt strange to talk, as if his mind itself knew this was something more buried than a secret. Not hidden, but transformed. “I don’t know where he was leading me, but I followed him. It’s cold, but I produce the cold. I’m empty, but I’ve never felt anything better.”_

Chilton nodded, one side of his mouth twisted in an overjoyed shape. “Yes, he is. More so to you.”

Moving in closer, Will wondered if his head had not been the first thing to sink, before he had even felt the ground melt down. In fact, he might have been entangled in clouds and not falling at all, all along. He formed the words carefully. “You should really think about how much less fun this would be to you, if he was not in a cell.”

A few seconds passed, during which Chilton’s face went from amused to serious, then it opted for aggressivity. “You look tense, Will,” he diagnosed. “You should see someone.”

“I will never again see any psychiatrist.”

A tight smirk. “Funny. You were just talking with me, right now.”

It was Will’s turn to smile. “You’re an author, Frederick.”

Chilton’s smile froze as he considered several retorts, but Will went around him before he had a chance to speak them. Doing so, Will was brought to stare down at the book placed on the chair. It lay on its front cover and the back was exposed. There was a picture of Chilton, smiling brightly, and one of Hannibal Lecter, stern, entirely other than the living, breathing creature Will remembered, the alloy of death and truth.

Inside, Will’s head disappeared under the surface and broken pieces piled on top of him, never letting go.

He heard Chilton’s steps diminish as he entered the elevator. He closed his eyes to avoid looking at his distorted image reflected in the stainless walls and breathed slowly, which did not work either. The doors opened and a corridor stretched before him. Second door to the left, he remembered the instructions. A guard stood there and led him to another hall, a gate, a room, and another guard, a woman, sitting at a small desk, doing crosswords.

She nodded, rose and started explaining how it would go on. Will listened unthinkingly.

Then he saw the small television screen in the corner and all the remaining hopes went away. The faint lavender smell of the psychiatrist’s office came to his nose, _the wooden door opening and Hannibal greeted him as Will stared down. Hannibal had asked what was on his mind, Will had mentioned a dream where his limbs were caught inside a tree._

_“It was not the branches into me. The worst was that I was hanging off the ground.”_

_“Were you afraid to leave the ground?”_

_“I don’t know what will happen when I get lost in my own mind.”_

_“Our mind does not necessarily elevate us, when it captures us.”_

_“I felt stretched thin, as if I dissolved into the air.”_

_“Air can support what thoughts, or wants, are made of.”_

The feed came from inside Hannibal’s cell. At first, Will saw nothing but a seemingly empty room, with no movement inside, high walls, grey tones everywhere. Then he took in the table, the shelves and the books, a drawing, more of them in a neat pile. And he saw him, too, sitting cross-legged on the bunk, leaning against the wall, an open volume in his lap.

It was like waking up and thinking simultaneously that he still slept and that he no longer did. It hit Will together, how different and how similar Hannibal was, altered, _by my hand_. Looking at a room on a 12-inch TV screen, in black and white, with a small figure in the corner, Will saw despair, solitude and recurring humiliation, exactly like his own. But deserved, his mind suggested. Or not, it answered immediately. Then he saw might and chaos and their glory and the screams – oh, the screaming, oh the gaping opening. The wider the divide grew between them, the more shadows filled it, living on their dissociation from each other, harvesting the careful threads that held down the memories. Will only wondered if speaking with Hannibal again would feel like raging sunlight or like smooth night sky. At least, the vapors would be gone.

The guard flicked a switch on the panel on her desk and leaned down toward a tiny microphone. “Visitor.”

Will’s eyes were on the screen. Hannibal paused for the words, not dropping his book yet but placing it face down on his chest, absorbed. He got up and Will noted the prison uniform bunching up everywhere. Hannibal did not look like a monster now. He seemed out of place, a hallucination in someone else’s mind.

The prisoner went to the table in the middle of the room and set things aside, adding the latest drawing to the pile, evening them out carefully to store them on a shelf. Once it was done, he walked back to the bed, leveling the sheets, positioning the pillow. Then he turned around and stared straight at the camera until Will dropped his gaze and followed the guard inside.

 

* * *

 

_The classroom quieted around him as he clicked through two more slides. A raised hand stopped him and he drank a sip of cold coffee while the student asked a lenghty question._

_“It’s difficult,” he started, frowning, “to draw a line like you’re trying to do.”_

_“Then how can we deduce a motivation from a crime scene?”_

_Will exhaled, knowing his unease appeared to be irritability. “I’m not offering you a method. I just want you to remember an important difference between compulsion, or addiction, and obsession. A compulsion is perceived as a repetitive, necessary action, prompted by an exterior agent or by an interior, but unmanageable force. Addiction is similar, but with a build-up component.”_

_“Both terms are used in descriptions of sacrifices offered to a higher entity.”_

_“Anthropology background?” Will asked._

_“No. Psychology PhD.”_

_“What’s your name?”_

_“Starling. Clarice Starling.”_

_“You’re not enrolled,” Will noted, not needing to look at the list of names._

_“No, Sir. I’m just auditing today’s lecture. If that’s alright.”_

_Will observed the young woman, first row, neat hair, no make-up, no computer, few hand-written notes. “Obsession,” he went on, “is prompted by other factors, interior or exterior, often indetermined and, most importantly, it is not perceived by an agent as something that escapes their control. They nurture it. They organize it. They rationalize it.” He twirled his coffee cup to feel if there was any left. There was none. “They want it,” he finished._

_“In most cases, diagnosed psychopaths explain their own crimes by relating them to something overpowering.”_

_Crossing his arms, Will shook his head. “This is a class, not a debate panel.”_

_“Okay,” the young woman conceded. “Where does that stand regarding the current professional consensus on self-perceived motivation in psychopathic serial murderers?” she elaborately rephrased._

_The profiler shrugged evasively. “Consensus is always provisional.” Starling placed her pen down on her desk, stilling. “Never forget that, when they describe themselves like this, they’re talking to you. By invoking a transcendental motive, they’re telling you that they’re not like you, that you’re not like them. That you don’t get it.” He halted, noticing that she was not writing anything down. “If you want to get it, you can’t accept that explanation. It’s too simple. It’s why you need the forensics, the scenes, the data. Because you can’t trust words. In the objects, they cannot hide and that’s when you can get inside their head.”_

_Starling thanked him coolly and Will shifted on his feet, ordering his thoughts back on the class._

 

* * *

 

On the building’s west side, Will found a path covered in pale gravel. It snaked through the trees. He reached a bench and took off his watch, placing it down beside him before he sat. There was twenty minutes left to the hour.

The hospital stood above him, towering or sheltering, and sheltering who from whom, Will did not know. Back home, things did not waver like this.

The voice sounded like it usually did, clear enough so that he knew his ears were not involved. The image was not as defined, perhaps because his mind had broken the habit. _“You don’t come to see me anymore,” Abigail said, at his side. She had put on a thicker coat and wore earmuffs. Her voice was not sad, not exactly, more like descriptive._

_He smiled, but it was a flash of anxiety. “I don’t have hallucinations anymore.”_

_“He told me you talked with him, everyday.”_

_The stream and the bloodied water was around them suddenly, and Hannibal waited further down, his back to them. “He does the talking,” Will whispered._

_“At least, you listen. I guess that’s good.”_

_Will focused on the trees and the wind. But Abigail remained detached and radiant, her coat starting to stain with the blood that came from underneath, compressed by her scarf, flowing down her clothes on her chest. “No, it’s really not,” he said. “Why are you here?”_

_Abigail smiled and snowflakes were catching in her hair. “I’m what you’ve been missing.”_

_“No,” Will said, standing up. “You’re part of what is going to eat me.”_

_On Abigail’s face, the reaction to denial looked exactly like it had on Hannibal’s face in his Baltimore kitchen, the stop of all thoughts, something being severed and something being flung open at the same time. “We were going to take care of you.” And then she cried._

Will pocketed his watch, got to his feet and walked the paths for the fifteen minutes he had left, making sure to keep his eyes on the ground at all times. When the time was up, he took his phone, turned it on and clicked on Molly’s name, not placing the call, just staring at the letters and it did calm him down. Now, he stood in the darkness and the thickness and it was coming for him, but he could just pretend it was not there.

 

* * *

 

_The lights from the police cars had long left when the doctor did. He had given Will a sedative that Will would not take, sleeping pills for the nights forever to come, something for his kidneys, to pee out the rest of the drugs he had already been given. Will had been examined at his kitchen table, in his barren house, and the pills stood untouched on the dust-covered counter._

_There seemed to be so much things to do suddenly, and all of them so new and so important, his mind lost track. Wash, find the dogs, be free, live on, let go, change, lie, turn and turn in bed, think of everything else there was to think about. Getting up to go to the bathroom to shower, he realized he could not, because there would be water and there would be meaning. And he would step out the same he was and he wanted to be no one in particular._

_He stumbled and fell in the narrow corridor, wrapped his arms around himself and cried uncontrollably. He was in Hannibal’s kitchen again, but there was no knife in his stomach, there were just arms around him that would never let go and Will hung onto them, eyes closed, because nothing else held him now._


End file.
